If life had unfolded the way it has for the last twenty-three years, I would now be en route to the site of the Unitarian Universalist Association’s General Assembly, getting a crew of fifteen or so volunteers ready to report, blog, video record, produce podcasts, and photograph this annual conference. But since I was laid off in March, things are different this year.
Mostly I’m finding that I don’t mind the thought of missing GA — at least, not too much. I will be sorry to miss the presentation of the Association’s Award for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Unitarian Universalism to a good friend; I am sorry I won’t be on the plenary floor for what promises to be a really interesting debate on whether to move the 2012 General Assembly from Phoenix to another location. And God knows, I will miss the friends and colleagues I’ve connected with all these years.
On the other hand, I don’t mind the break: I have had a delightful spring, filled with planting my garden (and now, beginning to harvest), engaging in yoga at a level far deeper than before, re-connecting with friends, blogging (yes, this blog), and finding out what the rhythm of my life is like when it’s not driven by very demanding and pressing deadlines and complaints. This sabbatical has been a real gift and I am grateful to my core. I feel like I have gotten a part of my life back.
And this weekend will bring something else I haven’t had in four years: a trip to the Isles of Shoals and Star Island, for a full week of vacation. The last time my husband and I were able to attend a full week of the Star Island conference we are most connected to, was 2006. Since then, the General Assembly schedule and the island conference schedule have not agreed, and Ben and I have had to send our daughter out to the island with friends, and content ourselves with a short half of a week in which to try and relax and rejuvenate. Not this year.
So on Saturday morning, we’ll get on a boat with friends, bring a gourmet picnic with us, and get ready for a wonderful, music-filled week in the place I love best in all the world. Ben and I met on Star when we were four years old, and we have raised our children on this island as well. Our daughter, Emily, has worked on Star for many summers, as Ben and I did when we were young adults. Our daughter, Abby, looks forward to the time – in just a couple of years — when she, too, will be old enough to join the summer staff and experience Star from the ‘inside,’ for a whole summer. We have to content ourselves with this one precious week, and a long weekend or two through the rest of the summer and fall.
Much has been written about Star Island, by famous writers and poets, and ‘just folks’ who fall in love with the place. For me, there is something remarkable that happens about ten minutes after the boat I’m on leaves the harbor headed for Star: the mainland releases its grasp, the news headlines and concerns of the world fade away. The cold, crisp air fills my lungs. My hair gets tangled in the wind, the salt spray mists my clothes. And I realize that I am there, in the now, on the sea, and it is all that I care about. Docking at Star, I walk up the path to the old hotel, past the flowers and the flagpole that I see with the eyes of the child I was…it is all the same now as it was then. The bell on the long piazza rings to announce events of the day, the voices of children and adults drift in and out on the breeze, there are no cars or TV’s or billboards. And, seated in a rocking chair or on the rocks themselves, I look out. Across Gosport Harbor, I watch the sailboats slip in and out of port, the rowboats moving as folks explore the coves of Smuttynose Island across the way. Life has slowed like heartbeats that calm after a half-hour of meditation.
I want no more than a Lime Rickey, a conversation with Ben or a friend I’ve known since childhood, back on the island with their family as am I. Life moves at a completely different pace here. It is all very, very simple and very, very good.
This is Island Mind…a time to reclaim the calm and peace and beauty that lives mostly in our imaginations, but too rarely in reality. Others find this bliss in different places: mountain tops, canyons at sunset, fishing on a placid lake. For me, Star is the place. I yearn for my island mind, which sits, somewhere inside me, waiting for its release. And I will, once more, be carried away.
Morning Stars Rising 